It only appears that way. If you look close at the two image you guys posted, they were created from a straight line of dots. The twisting bent the lines so that it looks like a design.

The one thing, I see, that I did not do was blend the text with the dots. Not to mention the one I did in illustrator was done with circles not dots(no fill and black stroke vs. no stroke and black fill). It was a quick mock up to show that the tool did work.

Notice the individual circles aren't deformed; they're all perfectly round. It's their locations that have been affected by deformation, as if dotted strokes, like in post 7 - and we can be pretty certain some sort of deformation was applied, the lines are too perfectly spaced/warped.

It's a well-done effect, and I'm convinced it can be reproduced by following a series of simple steps - no manual, artistic treatments necessary.

My first thought was it must be Photoshop, but since the circles are all still round it must be vector. But even if you could deform a series of paths into that spiraled mess so accurately, then simply using a dotted stroke won't suffice because they'd all be equally spaced and you won't get that moire effect where it looks like there's depth, troughs/valleys in the shapes implied by the spiraling dots.

Perhaps if you created a "skeleton" of the spiral in PS and placed it below your path array and then used the Warp Tool (by hand of course), following the lines in your guide "spiral skeleton" below as you stroked across your path array. AND/OR, what if before stroking with the Warp Tool, you snapped a single vector point to every circle made by your array of dotted stroked lines and deformed those - just a grid of lone vector points, no lines - with the Warp Tool instead? With the vector points warped around with the Warp Tool in the right way, what could you do with those points now? I honestly don't know. All I ever do withj singular vector points is purge them with Path Cleanup when they're leftover from a bunch of Pathfinder operations.

Anyway, once you got the dots in the right places if you then applied a radial gradient to each dot you might get the lettering effect in there by taking the word "mar", feathering the edges and setting it on top of the dots, set to a blend mode like Multiple or Hard Light so it darkens any dark pixels below making the dark inner part of each dot's radial gradient seem like a thicker black dot than ones not receiving the darkening blending.

. . . can't figure out how to get the dots arranged like the OP reference. Maybe this is a just some raster filter done in PS, who knows.

May be it was done with an approach similar to this. I made a blend between two curves shown on the left image, then deformed the blend starting with envelope distort continuing manually, and also applied the transform effect to make it go around. I used the dash line trick to make the dots and I also applied the bulged non uniformed stroke profile which caused the dots to look deformed too but I guess the paths can be used for replacing the spine of a blend with small circles.

With my approach the letters have to be done manually by widening the strokes to form letters with larger dots and my example will need denser lines in the text area to provide enough dots. My example was just throwing an idea, the reference image has much more cleaner pattern that is very well aligned. If it was done in a similar way that I'm suggesting, it would have a very different shape in step 2 on the image I attached. I only gave a rough example. It is obvious that a twirl deformation was applied or recreated using an initial graphic. The question is what was that initial graphic in its unwrapped shape before being distorted by the twirl. It is hard to figure that out by looking at the distorted result.

Start with a square array of dots, any shape, each an independent path. Determine spacing, both vertically and horizontally, by experimentation; should be uniform in each direction, but not necessarily the same in both. Select all, choose the Twirl tool, make the brush large enough to cover most or all of the array, with options determined by the control you need. When you're satisfied, apply Effect>Convert to Shape to whatever size or shape you please, expand appearance.

I'm not satisfied with the lettering yet, but I copied enough of the array to cover all the letters, locked the full array, pasted in front. Again applied Convert to shape, but with larger dimension. Created the lettering in front of the larger dots, selected letters and dots, made opacity mask.

Apologies if this is not an elegant presentation; it's almost dawn and I haven't slept yet.

I think you gave the correct answer. And by the way this was the first thing I tried but with an array of circles and although I got the same twirl as the reference, the circles were all stretched giving a very different appearance. It didn't occur to me that I can convert one anchor point paths to a circle shape. I haven't tried your suggestion yet but it is obvious that it will work. May be in addition to your steps it is better to wrap the points array with an envelope mesh grid for smoother twirl.

But the wording isn't right yet - there needs to be a gradual increase of size at the edges of the lettering, like halftone dots. With tromboniator's progress it's just a little manual finessing away, but there's gotta be a way to do it more mechanically, therefore precisely.

I think the letters were done manually. The circles on the letters look very precicely scaled to make a perfect transition but this can be achieved by creating selection guides with offset paths of the letters. The offset paths can be filled with different colors to serve as guides on a locked layer below and this will make relatively easy to select the right circles for scale transitions. And if you make different groups of circles for each size scale, the scale transform effect can be used on each group that will allow very fine tuning of the transition easier and in a more interactive way.

Furthermore, any circles that fall within your suggested "guide outlines" (the series of successively smaller and smaller letterform outlines) need only be the same size as the rest of the circles, and each of circles falling within your "guide outlines" would just receive a different outer stroke size, to make them greater and greater in size the closer they are to the innermost part of the letterforms. Now if only there was a way to convert a shape to a selection - you could use each "guide outline" for a new selection automatically, being careful where circles overlap mutliple "giude outlines".

This is a great and interesting effect. Looks like tromboniator has figured it out. As for the letters, I'm thinking maybe there was a feather to the edges or even a glow to soften the edges and softly blend in with the background and adjust the text layers blending options to Hard Light or Multiply, whichever works.

the background is easy, i cant figure out exactly how to fit the text into it. this is a halftone effect but the problem is the text has a irregular tone, it goes from a bit thick to a bit light back and forth making it harder.

It's not a halftone effect. Yes, it consists of dots, so it's reminiscent of halftone dots, but halftones don't take on that "warpfield" arrangement. True (real) halftone dots form a square grid and the only difference is the grid's angle and size of dots.

If it's "easy", could you duplicate the results for us to see? I for one would like an easy way to do this. Minus the text of course.

Not trying to challenge you, just would like to expand my own understanding.

sure it is a halftone effect. yes it's "easy" to duplicate the background. the text part is where the halftone values are which are hard to duplicate. the only way i see it is t incorporate the letters onto the background and then create an overall halftone effect but that stil didn't go well when i experimented. Judging by the letters used which is MOR? or something if this was a random text, there could be a way to duplicate the entire thing as is but if the designer intentionally wanted the letters MOR incorporated into the halftone, that would be difficult and i have no idea yet, still playing..

you rest your case? not sure you had a case to being with. Would you have the background done another way? Im not seeing the difference here, the background doesn;t match up or something? it's not word for word exact but that's all there is to the background.